Guest post by Alana Cattapan (York University, Dalhousie University)

The use of science fiction to make sense of reproductive technologies is nothing new.

As new advances in assisted reproduction make headlines, journalists, politicians, and policymakers alike herald their trajectory “from sci-fi to reality,” lauding or lamenting their potential emergence in the mainstream.

In debates on assisted reproduction, mentioning these works seems to allow commentators to articulate their deep-rooted fears about the implications of unfamiliar technologies. There is something about changing the nature of human reproduction that many find unsettling, and literary works help people work through these issues and to use them as a kind of shorthand to describe a range of concerns. To this end, science writer Philip Ball recently wrote in The Guardian that stories about intervention in procreation—science fiction or otherwise— “do the universal job of myth, creating an ‘other’ not as a cautionary warning but in order more safely to examine ourselves.” However, the use of fiction in policy debates may also serve a more pernicious function.

In the long road to what would eventually become the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, stakeholders, parliamentarians, academics, and journalists made appeal after appeal to science fiction to evoke a sense of urgency and fear about what assisted reproductive technologies might bring. References to Brave New World, Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The Handmaid’s Tale are found in policy documents, parliamentary debates, media reports, and responses from stakeholders, often with the intention of demonstrating science’s “temptation of going too far” or to evoke fear and abhorrence about the possibility of reproduction without women; “manipulating the most fundamental of all human relationships.” 
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In some cases, this fiction about a post-sexual reproductive future and associated emotions served as a proxy for policy research on and consultation with surrogate mothers and gamete donors. Donors and surrogates were rarely (read almost never) consulted in the long path to the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, though references to Atwood’s dystopic handmaid, and Huxley’s baby-hatching occurred relatively frequently. The deference to fiction to representing the negative experiences that were sure to come if surrogacy and gamete donation were not regulated – particularly clear in references to The Handmaid’s Tale – stand out when we consider that donors and surrogates were not substantively included in committee hearings or stakeholder consultations leading to the Assisted Human Reproduction Act. Though there are various reasons for this omission, including the short-term nature of any one egg donation or surrogacy, it is evident that emotional appeals to shared values through fiction are problematic when they seem not only to supplement understandings of the realities of surrogacy and egg donation but to supplant them.

In Canada, where the Assisted Human Reproduction Act has been in part, overturned, and where the provisions about egg donation and surrogacy have largely gone unimplemented, the Act is itself a matter of fiction, or at least, reflective of a fictive reality. The law has largely gone unenforced since it was passed, though the law states that paying for surrogacy and egg donation is illegal. However, without real enforcement there is complicit support of these practices, which Canadians engage in all the time. It follows that the Act, in its liminal legality/illegality is little more than empty words; a reflection of theoretical values displaced from reality. So, though it might be a stretch to say, what Canadians live with now, in terms of the governance of assisted human reproduction, is a fiction of politics – a political fiction– rather than the science fiction that shaped the Act from the first.

Alana Cattapan is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at York University and a research associate in the Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University. Her current research examines the social, legal, and ethical implications of public policy governing assisted reproductive technologies in Canada.